Posted
by
timothyon Thursday October 11, 2012 @10:52AM
from the warning-do-not-approach-trial-balloon dept.

WikiLeaks has for years relied on donated time and money to publish the scoops that it has; now, concealment writes "As of Wednesday night, the secret-spilling site now shows a 'paywall' to any visitor who clicks on one of its leaked documents, including the 13,374 emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor that it published earlier in the day along with the teaser that the messages regarded presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The pop-up message that blocks access to the site's content shows a video parodying Barack Obama's stump speeches and asking visitors to instead 'vote for WikiLeaks' by making a donation to the site or buying its promotional gear like tote bags and hoodies."

Cryptome make a big play of 'hosting things the gvmt tries to hide', but in reality it's mostly badly rendered maps of roads running through area51, unintelligible court transcripts about topics only total paranoiacs worry about, the occasional commercially sensitive dataset, etc.. Nothing of any global note, certainly nothing nearly as useful as the consular docs or stratfor stuff.

I watched how it reacted when Wikileaks got the real scoops, and it was obvious that cryptomes owner would never actually wobble the status-quo, and seemed indignant that anybody else would, especially if infringing on 'his' territory.

My sneaking suspicion is that cryptome was/is run with the full co-operation of your military-cia-fbi-industrial overlords to provide an outlet for paranoid and the tin-foil brigade, without actually doing anything that might hold them to public account.

My sneaking suspicion is that cryptome was/is run with the full co-operation of your military-cia-fbi-industrial overlords to provide an outlet for paranoid and the tin-foil brigade, without actually doing anything that might hold them to public account.

While this isn't entirely unreasonable a response, my irony meter pegged for a moment at hearing you come up with a conspiracy theory that cryptome is just run to placate people clinging to conspiracy theories.

I have to wonder who at Wikileaks thought that this would be a good idea.

I suspect that the reason they're not getting as many donations as they used to is because if wikileaks got labeled an enemy of the state then people who had donated would be targets. Putting up a paywall isn't going to motivate people to take that risk.

Part of the point of wikileaks is to get maximum exposure for the information, and adding a barrier to entry is going to go against their cause.

Do you really have to ask who at wikileaks made this decision? Is there anyone with any power to do that other than the obvious answer? Can it be any more clear how dedicated the site is to the promotion of one individual's ego over the stated mission?

Hush you. Wikileaks can do no wrong. Neither can He Who Shall Not Be Named.

No kidding, Assange is playing a tight game. He stays in the news, out of jail, and relevant while challenging the very biggest dictators and criminals on Earth with little more than an internet connection.

Looking at the histories of US, Chinese, and Russian military and intellgence agencies, I would not call the 'west' and easy target in the last. There might be some differences in how the US treats its own citizens, they have a history of doing some pretty cold stuff to forign nationals, esp when there is a buisness interest involved.

Looking at the histories of US, Chinese, and Russian military and intellgence agencies, I would not call the 'west' and easy target in the last. There might be some differences in how the US treats its own citizens, they have a history of doing some pretty cold stuff to forign nationals, esp when there is a buisness interest involved.

Most of the worst offenses had to do with US importers trying to get produce and other goods out of South American countries, at least the ones I am familiar since they are old enough to have actually gotten out there. The US (military) was pretty brutal in getting rid of activists and governments that did not give advantagous trade deals to US companies.

I'm not much of an America basher, but they're probably talking about things like the Banana Wars [wikipedia.org]. It's not exactly "offing" anyone in particular. This is less about CIA assassination and more about landing marines.

Maybe the rest posted before it was taken down. The whole wikileaks/Assange campaign, including the feigned anger from the authorities, is starting to look suspiciously like a honeypot to pull people away from the more credible cryptome.org and similar sites.

I'm posting anonymously to avoid needless burning of karma for telling the uncomfortable truth about this bullshit.

I would say that "Sack of lying shit" is a little overboard. Great job being melodramatic.I read TFA, posted a reaction, and whether the paywall has been removed had no bearing on my posting, merely that a paywall existed at all.

So calm down, don't jump to conclusions, and stick to a productive discussion rather than being an armchair quarterback.

Just because they took it down isn't a good reason to call people a "sack of lying shit". Actually, there's no good reason to do that. Why not treat people fairly? How did it feel when I responded to you the same way? I've noticed that most name calling jerks don't take that very well.

I clicked this link [wikileaks.org] on the front page of wikileaks.org and was immediately confronted with a paywall that matched the description in the article. That's great if you don't see a paywall where you are from, but that doesn't make those that do see it a "sack of lying shit".

There is/was a paywall, but it is/was very leaky. They could have made it a nagwall by saying "Click here to proceed without paying", but they didn't do that. An uninformed user going to the site would have assumed they had to pay to proceed.

Also, when you called the poster a "sack of lying shit", you said "three people seem to have checked and noticed there is no paywall - not even in Google's cache", but made no argument about semantics. Now you're moving the goalposts after having been wrong about the ex

I have to wonder who at Wikileaks thought that this would be a good idea.

I don't see why this would confuse you, most newspapers are doing this nowadays. It's great when the news is free, and it would be wonderful if Wikileaks could fund itself through donations like they used to, but with the blockade set up by the payment processors they're in terrible need of money and, given that this is the approach that every other news organization is taking, this seems like the obvious route for them.

Your statement about fear of persecution is also valid, for sure, but without the bank

Were you too lazy to click on the file links? As the Forbes article indicates, you may visit the site as normal, but clicking on files will direct you to the "paywall".
Do I have any opinion on wikileaks due to this? No. We need information, from wherever it comes.

As always, the usual problem, always changing. After donating, we get on the USA shit list for the rest of our lives, spend quality time with the TSA at airports with laptop copying and/or confiscation, and mysterious entities investigating our friends. Employers and schools secretly inquiring about our backgrounds see security flags. Intimidation doesn't require actual actions against us. The threat alone is what causes donations and support to dry up.

The fact is that life costs money, and we all want to do what we love as day jobs, because there isn't enough time to fully do anything else. Thus writers, musicians, artists, software writers, etc. need to get paid.

I think the idea of "information wants to be free" applies to information, not information products. The knowledge about how to play a guitar, or write code for a specific operating system, should not be kept away from those who can use it. That doesn't mean they should be entitled to free downloads of all software, music, books, etc.

That wasn't really a fair article. If you read it carefully, it was her publisher that went after the people sharing the book on the internet, not her. Why should she care anyway, she's presumably already been paid by the publisher, probably gets very little "per book sold", and the free publicity is worth more to her than the royalties. For all we know, it could have been her sharing copies for free.

While portions of the paywall video such as the false dichotomy of left/right make sense, I do not believe that voting with a wallet is "the only thing that matters".
This version [youtube.com] seems a preferable form of advertisement. And it's not blocking any files.

Update: WikiLeaks has confirmed that the pop-up is intentional, but pointed out via Twitter that visitors can skirt the paywall by sharing a link to the donation pop-up instead of paying, or simply waiting several minutes, as I found.

Of course, this is anathema to the "I want it for FREE and I want it NOW" crowd. My guess is that anyone with the patience to actually read through the Stratfor reports doesn't mind waiting several minutes.

Are there any lawyers who can comment on whether offering money might constitute inducement to criminal behavior? It seems like that might implicate in WikiLeaks in criminal behavior when simply taking receipt of sensitive information does not.